ANIM8OR TUTORIAL: HOW TO MAKE A ROCKET. LESSON 2
By José Pablo Luna Sánchez. 2006.

In this tutorial we will cover how to make a rocket using lathe, mirroring and we will learn the basics about texturing with UV mapper.

You need:

If you are not familiar with UV mapping, or if you have problems when drawing splines, you may like to read this:

Let's begin

LOADING THE BLUEPRINTS

FITTING VIEW TO OBJECT

MOVING OBJECT

ZOOMING IN A CERTAIN AREA

DRAWING THE MAIN BODY

MOVING OBJECT TO TEMPORARY STORAGE

Moving objects to temporary storage is required sometimes so the area where we are working doesn't become cluttered with objects.
As the objects are moved to such storage they preserve their coordinates and everything.
But they are in a place where you won't make your work difficult.

DRAWING THE MAIN ENGINE EXHAUST

MOVING TO TEMPORARY STORAGE

DRAWING THE BOOSTER

ADDING TEXTURES TO AN OBJECT

In the next steps we will need to add textures.
To do that we need UV coordinates which makes the texture to be attached to the mesh in a certain way (it tells the program how the texture should be wrapped around the mesh), and also we need the texture itself, which is assigned to a certain material.
Materials can be assigned to a mesh using Anim8or, but UV coordinates need some special process using another software.

UV coordinates are assigned to a mesh using a software called UV Mapper Classic.
UV Mapper Classic uses meshes saved in OBJ format, so we need to export out object as an OBJ file, add the textures, and then import it back into Anim8or.

Once we have it, we need to create a material and assign a texture to it.
And then we need to assign the material to our mesh.
Sounds complex?
If you look at the diagram you will understand what we need to do.

If you don´t have a textured mesh at the end, it means that:

This was the general idea of what we are going to describe as follows.
Now let's go step by step.

CONVERTING OBJECTS TO OBJ

UV mapper works with OBJ files.
Since it will merge all objects in the file when you save in UV mapper, then we must save object by object separately or we won't be able to handle them separately.

ADDING UV COORDINATES (USING CYLINDRICAL TEXTURING)

We will need to repeat the following procedure with every OBJ file we just saved.
We intend to wrap the mesh as if we were wrapping a cylinder.

and this is how the mesh would look with our current UV texturing provided by Anim8or...
This is not good... What do we do?


We will learn how to use UV mapper to texture our mesh.

Fortunately we have a texture that already included those 2 objects, instead of only one.
Unfortunately, the mesh is not yet textured right now, only the UV coordinates for the texture had been added to those objects.

Good texturing is what brings life to a mesh.
As you go on, you will discover that.

ADDING TEXTURES IN ANIM8OR

As we saw before, we added the coordinates of the texture to all vertices of our objects.
But we need to assign them a texture.

VERIFYING HOW TEXTURING LOOKS

ROTATION USING PIVOTS

When you do any operation involving resizing or rotating, it is done around a point called "pivot".
You may notice that we need to rotate this booster without changing its position.
So we need to see if the pivot is aligned with the centerline of the booster.

MIRRORING AND ROTATING THE BOOSTER

We need to add 4 boosters.
First we need to add a new booster.

Now we have this

Now we need to select and mirror each booster individually.